Why Osbert Lancaster is our favourite writer on interiors

Baroque

"A taste for the grandiose, like a taste for morphia, is, once
it has been fully acquired, difficult to keep within limits, and
all the various potentates who during the first decades of the
eighteenth century so eagerly followed where Louis XIV had led,
soon found themselves provided with residences which, while being
undoubtedly of an extreme impressiveness, fulfilled just about as
many of the ordinary requirements of a home as do the
Pyramids."